Thursday, April 02, 2009

Walkabout

Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.

Albert Camus

“The term Walkabout comes from the Australian Aboriginal. The idea is that a person can get so caught up in one’s work, obligations and duties that the truly important parts of one’s self become lost. From there it is a downward spiral as one gets farther and farther from the true self. A crisis situation usually develops that awakens the wayward to the absent true self.

It is at this time that one must go on walkabout. All possessions are left behind (except for essential items) and one starts walking.

Metaphorically speaking, the journey goes on until you meet yourself. Once you find yourself, you sit down and have a long talk about what one has learned, felt and done in each other’s absence. One talks until there is nothing left to say — the truly important things cannot be said.

If one is lucky, after everything has been said and unsaid, one looks up and sees only one person instead of the previous two.” walkabout.com

I’ve been feeling about an inch away from a walkabout the last few months. Like a parallel plastic membrane that catches in the wind just outside of my vision, I see its coming with all my fibrous and rooted antennas of sense.

I don’t think I’m alone – I see the signs and portents everywhere I look. We live in a nation that is long overdue both a great public fire and an individual need to find in movement a place we can give up our stand. It’s time to let go by going.

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About Me

"Supreme egotism and utter seriousness are necessary for the greatest accomplishment,
and these the Irish find hard to sustain; at some point, the instinct to see life in a
comic light becomes irrestible, and ambition falls before it."
William Shannon